2015/06/01 by Lorraine Daston, Glenn W. Most · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #History of Science and Natural History #History and Developments in Astronomy #Historical and Literary Studies
paper · doi:10.1086/681980
While both the sciences and the humanities, as currently defined, may be too heterogeneous to be encompassed within a unified historical framework, there is good reason to believe that the history of science and the history of philologies both have much to gain by joining forces. This collaboration has already yielded striking results in the case of the history of science and humanist learning in early modern Europe. This essay argues that first, philology and at least some of the sciences (e.g., astronomy) remained intertwined in consequential ways well into the modern period in Western cultures; and second, widening the scope of inquiry to include other philological traditions in non-Western cultures offers rich possibilities for a comparative history of learned practices. The focus on practices is key; by shifting the emphasis from what is studied to how it is studied, deep commonalities emerge among disciplines--and intellectual traditions--now classified as disparate.